Tuesday, January 15. 2008

As First Lady, Hillary Clinton was apparently directly responsible for all of the innovations and successes of the Clinton administration but none of its or ethical lapses or mistakes; at least, that’s what one is supposed to conclude from Hillary’s interviews with the media. This is especially the case with the the Rwanda genocide, the former First Lady's role in which is almost never subject to media scrutiny or public scrutiny of any kind.

The genocide was dramatized in the film “Hotel Rwanda,” with Don Cheadle playing the role of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the hotel who displayed extraordinary courage in his efforts to save hundreds of Tutsis from certain death at the hands of machete-wielding death squads. Rusesabagina established the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to provide “support, care, and assistance to children orphaned by, and women abused during, the genocide in Rwanda.”

In a segment aired during the course of an interview on ABC's This Week that aired in December, Bill Clinton suggests that the First Lady advised him to intervene in Rwanda in 1994.

“If I had moved then, we might have saved as many as a third of those lives; and she would have done that,” the former president says of his wife. Stephanopoulus then asked the junior senator from New York to confirm her husband’s assertion, and Hillary answers in the affirmative, claiming that she would have intervened had she been president.

But other than the statement from Bill Clinton — made in full campaign mode on behalf of his wife — there is not a shred of evidence to support the contention that the First Lady urged the president to intervene in Rwanda. And because Bill and Hillary have refused to make public the papers of the Clinton administration — including the First Lady’s own documents as well as those of the president — there is no way to independently verify the Clintons’ assertion, conveniently enough for Hillary.

Speaking of Rwanda, Hillary tells George Stephanopoulus (who served in the Clinton administration as the senior advisor to the president for policy and strategy) in her interview with him on ABC's This Week, “I believe that our government failed.” But who was ‘our government’? It was, of course, the administration of Bill Clinton, in which Hillary played a leading role. The simple fact is that Bill and Hillary Clinton had it within their power to save 800,000 Rwandans from the worst genocide since World War II, but they refused to do so, despite desperate pleas from U.S. and U.N. officials in Rwanda.

Hillary is attempting to portray herself as “a full partner to her husband in his administration,” and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.” And it is certainly true that Hillary was the first First Lady to get an office in the policy-making West Wing rather than in the ceremonial East Wing, where First Ladies traditionally had their offices. But the First Lady “did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda,” Healy concludes. And the one initiative in which Hillary was given a leading role — health care reform — was a complete and utter failure, so much so that it ushered in 12 years of Republican control of Congress.

But listening to the former First Lady, it would seem that Hillary had responsibility only for the Clinton administration’s successes; unfortunate occurences such as genocide in Rwanda are the responsibility of ‘our government,’ semantically distanced by Hillary’s comments from the Clinton White House in which she was a full partner, in her own description.

Unfortunately for them, Rwandans were black Africans who could neither vote for Bill or Hillary nor vote against them and who were too poor to contribute to any Clinton presidential campaign, and so it was of no interest to Bill or Hillary Clinton as to whether they lived or died.

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